Chuck Sweeny: Tea Party's David Hale to challenge Adam Kinzinger

Thursday

Sep 12, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 12, 2013 at 11:02 AM

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Channahon, was fortunate in choosing to run for a second term in the newly drawn 16th District, which, while conservative, does have some more liberal areas such as parts of the south suburbs and DeKalb.

Chuck Sweeny

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Channahon, was fortunate in choosing to run for a second term in the newly drawn 16th District, which, while conservative, does have some more liberal areas such as parts of the south suburbs and DeKalb. Kinzinger first had to defeat 20-year incumbent Don Manzullo in the GOP primary, which he did with surprising ease. Then, Kinzinger trounced Democrat Wanda Rohl in the 2012 general election.

Kinzinger has coupled his seat on the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee with his experience as a pilot in the Air National Guard and the Air Force to become a rising star on the national scene when it comes to foreign policy concerns. In the current debate over whether the U.S. should use military force against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop him from further use of chemical weapons, Kinzinger sides with the interventionists, saying chemical weapons are beyond the pale and should never be used.

Kinzinger frequently appears on Sunday news shows and evening commentary shows. I even heard him guest hosting a WLS-AM talk show. But Washington glitz hasn’t captured him; Kinzinger is frequently in the Rockford area, promoting manufacturing and talking to business groups about how to improve the economy.

Kinzinger is conservative, but he’s more moderate than fire-breathing congressmen like Iowa’s Steve King or Louie Gohmert of Texas. Kinzinger is, by my reckoning at least, a good fit for the district.

But some on the right who supported Manzullo don’t think Kinzinger is sufficiently conservative. One of them is David Hale, founder of the Rockford Tea Party. Hale says he’s challenging Kinzinger for the 2014 Republican nomination to Congress and will begin circulating petitions Friday.

“The Congress must not allow themselves to be rushed into any military action absent either an imminent threat and particularly where its justification and probable outcomes remain so unclear,” said Hale.

“The proposed ‘microattack’ as Secretary of State John Kerry was calling it, will most certainly devastate the intended military targets and also cause the death of thousands of innocent civilians,” Hale said. “Will the proposed police action (Remember the Korean Conflict?) also ignite World War III in the Middle East?”

Hale, a registered nurse and Army veteran, has led the local Tea Party since starting it in 2009.

By a 7-6 vote, Rockford aldermen decided Monday to change their meeting times to allow aldermen and the public to attend more than one committee meeting.

The vote was a win for freshman Ald. Tom McNamara, D-3, who advocated the change.

However, Monday’s action wasn’t the final step. Aldermen must still vote on an ordinance to put the changes into effect. And given the closeness of the vote, the outcome is not certain.

In McNamara’s plan, council committees would meet at 4, 5 and 6 p.m., followed by the full council meeting at 7 p.m. Council meetings now start at 6 p.m. I learned Wednesday that council meetings used to begin at 7 p.m. As former Ald. Dick Baer, R-10, wrote, “If my old memory is right we went from 7 p.m. to 6 p.m. when Monday Night Football started.”

Baer was an alderman from 1967 to 1981. Monday Night Football began on ABC in September 1970.

Chuck Sweeny: 815-987-1366; csweeny@rrstar.com; @chucksweeny

An American president is again itchin’ to play the macho card and use the world’s biggest military machine under dubious pretexts. (I think we’ve been to this movie before, and before and before.)

Barack Obama had planned to launch missile strikes against unidentified targets in Syria without asking Congress for its OK when a funny thing happened: The British House of Commons rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s request to use military force in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad, who the Obama administration says sprayed deadly sarin gas on his own people in the suburbs of Damascus.

The 1929 Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of chemical weapons in war; Germany had made widespread use of poison gas against British, French and American troops in the 1914-18 war.
Cameron’s surprise defeat caused Obama to rethink his strategy. He decided to seek legislative approval, too. As of Friday, it didn’t look as if he would get it.

How will Rep. Cheri Bustos vote on attacking Syria, if there is such a vote this week? She’s undecided. “What has happened in Syria is unthinkable and a horrible reality,” the first-term East Moline Democrat said. “However, many questions remain before we can determine the most appropriate course of action.”

Bustos said she’s listening to constituents. If she is listening, she knows the American people overwhelmingly oppose the U.S. starting another ill-advised war in the Middle East, especially in Syria, where Assad, the dictator we would punish, runs a secular regime, has never messed with Israel and does not persecute Christians.

The “rebel” groups the U.S. plans to support, even the Free Syrian Army championed by Sen. John “Bombs Away” McCain, R-Ariz., are Islamist radicals committed to Israel’s destruction and the implementation of a fundamentalist theocracy.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger is even more gung-ho to go to war than McCain. The Channahon Republican, an Air National Guard pilot and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a hearing last week that we must teach Assad that he can’t use chemical weapons. Showing a photograph of victims, Kinzinger said:

“This is a picture of Syrian children ... about 400-some died in at least just this one chemical gas attack. If we don’t do anything about this, you can ensure that maybe even the kids in this picture or definitely other kids will die from the same attack.”

About 100,000 people have died in the 2-year-old civil war, almost all from guns, rockets, mortars and cannons. Among them were some Syrian soldiers, who were stripped naked and shot in their necks, gangland-style, by rebels — who recorded the execution. The picture ran on the front page of The New York Times. The shooters belong to one of the hundreds of thuggish groups Kinzinger and Obama want to help.

Did the 100,000 victims of conventional warfare die acceptable deaths? Did the 1,400 victims of chemical warfare die unacceptable deaths? Death in war is brutal.

Maybe the Russians can pull us back from the edge. They’ve told longtime ally Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to an international body. At least somebody has some common sense.